All the Broken Pieces
by foreverwriting9
Summary: Five confessions by Grace Van Pelt.


I.

She sees O'Laughlin one more time after the debacle in the woods with Janpen.

It all starts when she mistakenly goes to investigate a potential suspect by herself. One moment she's knocking on the suspect's rickety front door, and then suddenly she is bruised and battered and tied to a chair in a barely-lit basement. (She should know better by now.)

When she finally regains consciousness, there is a scowling man leaning over her, his fingers gripped around a gun.

"Now see here, missy, this is what comes of poking your nose in other people's business," he says, leaning in toward her and bringing the gun closer to her face.

Van Pelt pulls at the ties binding her wrists together. "I'm a CBI agent, and the longer you detain-"

The blow the man deals to her face is solid and quick and akin to hitting a brick wall.

When she wakes up again, the man is gone and she is surrounded by nothing but shadows and dust. She swears then, long and loud, because she is frustrated and _tied to a chair_ and it is her own damn fault she's in this situation.

"It's not your fault, you know." The voice interrupts her cursing and sends a shiver skittering down her spine. _She knows that voice_. (Used to _love_ that voice.)

Van Pelt turns her head, and standing next to her is O'Laughlin. He smiles at her in a pained way and then opens his mouth to speak again.

She doesn't like to think about their conversation.

II.

She prays for Jane.

She knows he probably doesn't want her prayers, doesn't believe in them either, but she thinks it's worth a try.

_Keep him safe._

She tried, once, to fit all of her worries and hopes for Jane into one prayer. They simply didn't fit.

_Keep him safe_. She sticks with the one thought now, because they are a team, a family, and he needs all the protection he can get.

"I don't believe in prayers," he says one day, without preamble, and without looking up from his book of Sudoku puzzles. Van Pelt keeps her eyes on the file in front of her.

"I do," she says firmly.

Jane doesn't argue.

III.

She doesn't dream anymore, instead she just has nightmares.

In this one, she stands at the top of a cliff, watching the ocean churn beneath her. The wind howls loudly all around, but she can still hear his voice clear as day.

"Will you jump?" O'Laughlin stands amongst the rocks and tall, dry grass in his bloody suit, smiling at her.

"Craig?" She watches the red blossom across his white shirt, terror catching in her throat. For some reason, in this dream, she always forgets that he is supposed to be dead.

"Will you jump?" he repeats, taking a step closer to her.

Van Pelt stumbles backwards, loose pebbles sliding out from under her feet. She stops with her heels right at the edge of the cliff, the wild sea air pushing against her back. "I don't understand," she shouts over the roaring in her ears.

O'Laughlin continues walking until he stands right in front of her, his blood dripping onto her shoes. "You're not meant to," he says, and then a wide, red smile rips across his face, and suddenly Van Pelt is falling into the sea.

About half way down she realizes that O'Laughlin has ripped his necklace from around her neck.

In the other nightmare, she's walking through an eery version of her childhood home with the cold steel of a gun heavy in her hands.

"Hello?" Her voice rebounds off the empty walls around her. _Hello, hello, hell-_ When she reaches the door of her old room, the echoes stop and become a real voice sing-songing back to her.

"Hello? Hello? Hello?" It's a chant in her ears, and she _knows that voice_.

The door creaks open by itself, and when Van Pelt peeks in, she finds O'Laughlin painting smiley faces on the wall. His fingers leave rose red streaks across the pale yellow colors of her bedroom, and Van Pelt has to choke back the sob that's building in her chest.

"Hello? Hello?" he trills, finishing the smile on one of his bloody faces.

Van Pelt shoots him in the back without hesitating.

He turns around to face her, momentarily stunned. Then he frowns and points at her with one bloody finger. "That wasn't very nice, Grace."

She shoots him again, but he doesn't die.

IV.

She doesn't think she believes in love anymore.

She tries to pretend sometimes. She really does. At night, lying in between her cold sheets, she squeezes her eyes shut and tries to believe in fairy tales and princes and _magic_ again.

It doesn't work.

No matter how hard she tries, all she can see now is blood spattered darkness, and it has slowly begun eating away at her.

Jane is the first one to notice. (Of course.)

"You're different," he says to her one day, while he's sitting on his couch, simply _watching_ and drinking tea.

Van Pelt doesn't even bother looking over at him, just keeps tapping away at the keys in front of her. "I don't know what you're talking about, Jane."

"There's no need to deny it, Grace," he says with a smile, and he sounds far too pleased with himself. (Sometimes she honestly doesn't understand how no one's killed him yet.)

She spins around in her chair. "Deny what?" she asks, wincing when her voice comes out too high and strangled.

Jane watches her over his teacup. "You're not the same young agent who came to us, all shiny and bright, believing I was psychic." He says it so mournfully that Van Pelt wonders if maybe what he craves above all else from his audiences is the wide-eyed wonder she _used_ to have. (Somewhere between chasing serial killers and shooting her fiancé she lost that feeling.) "You're tired," he continues, "and disillusioned."

"Yeah, well, facing down killers will do that to a person."

He nods in agreement. "Sure it will." He looks suddenly very sad and wise as he says the words. "Just don't let it devour you," he adds, before standing up and making his way over to Lisbon's office.

Van Pelt wants to call after him and tell him that he is the very last person who should be giving that advice, that he is dark and angry and far too vengeful, but she stops herself. Instead, she half-whispers a _thank you_ to his retreating back, because in this moment she realizes that coming from him those words aren't empty and hypocritical.

They mean everything.

V.

(This is her conversation with O'Laughlin.)

"It's not your fault, you know." He appears next to her, looking handsome and alive, and Van Pelt wants to scream as soon as she sees his too bright eyes.

"It is," she insists, trying to ignore the sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach.

O'Laughlin takes a step closer to her. "It's not."

She won't argue with a dead man, so she just changes the topic. "I don't want to die," she admits as he moves to stand directly in front of her.

He smiles as though her words are silly. "You won't," he promises.

Van Pelt shifts her gaze down to his shoes. "How do you know?"

"I just do."

Somehow, that's enough. She pulls experimentally at the ties around her ankles, but quickly gives up when it becomes apparent that they are just as tight as the ones around her wrists. O'Laughlin's gaze creeps over her face, and when she finally finds the courage to look up at him, and notices the _way_ he is looking at her (like he loves her, like she didn't kill him, like he didn't dupe her and break her heart), she is struck by a sudden thought.

"Why aren't you evil?" The words tumble out of her mouth almost rudely.

O'Laughlin shrugs. "Do you want me to be evil?"

"No."

"Then I'm not evil."

The answer seems so _simple_, and Van Pelt can't help the little burst of relief that floods through her chest. "I thought that maybe...I don't know-"

"That I was a malevolent spirit returned from the grave to haunt you?" he asks. "You should know, I would never do that to you, Grace." There's something light and wonderful in his eyes as he says the words, and he looks so _alive_.

Van Pelt reaches a hand out to touch him, but then stops, remembering.

O'Laughlin watches her, taking a step forward until her outstretched hand brushes against the front of his coat. "I'm fine," he whispers, reaching up and pulling back his coat to reveal the stainless white button-down he's wearing underneath. "We're fine," he adds, leaning down toward her until their noses almost, _almost_ touch.


End file.
